President Donald Trump’s latest tariff executive order creates an exclusion process for many goods not readily available in the United States. The order establishes Annex III, a new list of goods that could receive tariff exclusions or reduced rates under bilateral agreements with trading partners.
“It doesn’t help with stability; if anything, you just have a whole other set of new questions introduced with processes that we don’t know how they’re going to work, that there are no precedent for,” Bracewell’s Josh Zive told Law360. “So I think it leaves open one of the primary frustrations from the private sector, and that is just the unpredictability of the tariff regime.”
Annex III could in some instances create more complexities for companies, Zive said.
“Just knowing, for example, that the tariff on a product might go away, that might actually introduce more commercial complexity for you than if you knew it was or wasn’t for sure, because how do you allocate, for example, in a contract the costs if one side thinks the tariff is going to go away and the other doesn’t?” Zive said.
